Not to bash pang, qz or anyone else on the developing team. but its been over a year now and the game is shrinking rather than growing. it almost seems to me that the game is being kept around just for us old timers. It makes me sad to think that there used to be a dozen clans in 1a alone with 100 + members. now we cant even manage 1? what happened to this big add campaign/facebook app that was supposed to happen?

They havent finished the Facebook version of Earth yet is why...

By over a year you mean 7 months.

My question in return would be to ask what you have done to help grow the game in the 7 months it has been live? If nothing, why not?

We need some retarded little animated ad banners like other games have on this site..

or we could do our own kinda crusades. join our game or get a virus...

It hasn't been a year, this game launched in December.

There were other problems with it beyond just the administrator(s)

lol thats just my warped perception of time I guess. And shin dont be a douche u know nothing about me. having led an alliance for 5+ years i have tried endlessly to get old players to come back and to get new people to join and i know hard it can be. I was merley trying to show how sad it makes me to see a game i grew up playing slowly die.

True but in the good ol days of swirve, half of 1a were multies :P
Even most of ffa was bot run too. All that is fixed. But would be great if the game grew fast.

Plus, pang and qz both have a lot of more important stuff than earth to do. Once they can focus more attention on it, I'm sure it'll get better.

I think one problem is that we actually made it considerably more difficult to have multies. This really removes alot of untags.... which in turn causes some problems... we have ideas in the pipeline to fix this, but these things take time =/

i still think that the community could get some free advertising out there.

there are several hundred people playing alliance, which means we could easily get ee frontpaged on both digg and reddit if everyone posted it on their alliances site/insited their members/mass messaged all countries ingame a link to digg/upvote.

frontpage means tons of visitors, and you just need a small percentage of them to try out the game for this place to be swarming with noobs again.

If this game is dying it isn't the fault of pang and co. I beleive the core player base has remained close to the same for quite a while now, minus some multis.

The game it's self is not as popular because of the time we live in. Let's face it a text based game in this day and age isn't as appealing as it was 10 years ago!

I dugg Dave's EE submission on digg a while ago! I was the only one who had though.. We need a power user to play earth:P

I don't think that's entirely true, Requiem. There is definitely a niche for a turn-based strategy game like this. It's not the same kind of market we would have seen in the 90's, but one certainly exists.

Making the move to include new platforms like Facebook and eventually mobile devices is the core of our marketing strategy. We need to make the game appeal to our target market if we want it to be successful. To make it appeal to this new market, we've had to build entirely new pieces to the game which never existed before and update many other aspects of the game.

We only get ONE chance at this, and we want to ensure we do it properly. Look at Mars2025, for example. I'm not sure of the whole story, so please correct me/expand on this if you know more. To my knowledge, they just plopped the game on Facebook as-is and started marketing it, but they didn't do a really good job making it into a positive user experience or able to retain users. They got a lot of players, but those accounts were dormant within a short time and the existing community was unhappy with the whole thing.

That takes time, and both qz and I have day jobs and Slag is busy with school (although not in the summer :p).
Anyways... hopefully that explains why we're not just tossing our half finished work out there and seeing what happens :p

Havoc: we'll get some more stuff going like that in the coming weeks :p

Honestly I think Pang will get this turned around and bring the game back from the brink. He seems quite invested in it and has put in a ton of man hours.

The whole 'Why isn't it ready yet' attitude is basically the reason why text based games don't attract many new gamers.

And also exactly why the development team wants to have this as ready as possible before it gets released

I just consider myself a lucky alpha tester in Earth2025 2.

So enjoy the ride, do what you can to promote the game, and maybe pitch in to help the site hosting.

Who knows. Maybe one day Bill Gates stumbles onto here and vola we farm his country!

All i heard was Sauron volunteering to do some recruiting for rage!:p

*runs*

it takes a lot of time to impliment code and create a game and I bet a lot of times the admins don't come straight home from working 8 + hours and think "man i'm dead tired but I better work on my online game!"

no they are tired and they have lives outside this game

they have done quite a bit in just 8 months and like all admins they are doing more behind the scenes and, like Pang said, if you do something to fast, all the work will be for nought and they only get 1 shot at making this game appealing.

Face book is great as if those players like it, it will spread through word of mouth and many people on facebook have a LOT of friends that will be curious about it to

I think the truth is that there aren't a whole lot less players in the game so much as there's a whole lot less cheaters being able to play the game with hundreds and thousands of multis.

Maybe Earth on its own could have created a nice player base, but the POS cheaters who thought they were hot fluff on a silver platter screwed that.

That said, nothing was done to stop them.

Sauron: You and your gang sure as hell didnt do anything to help the game grow, dude.

You fluffers saw an opportunity to dominate a server and obviously didn't stop to think about how your selfishness might screw the game over.

None of that mattered to you so long as NBK was the Uber R00LERZ of Teh Sinking Ship.

SO don't go busting the balls of the TPTB when you are just as responsible for not helping promote an environment that encourages more people to play.

Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. It was a completely valid question to ask and he did it in a way that surely wasn't 'busting anyone's balls.'

That is certainly a valid opinion on your part. I also know what I see on the servers that matter.


Just sayin'

Pang you make a good point.... many people start facebook applications for a day or so and never log on again. in fact i havent seen a facebook application in a LONG time. i havent had an application invite in what seems like 6 months. have the facebook applications died off? and if so we dont want to link this game to a dying fad

Congrats on seeing what all of us have known for YEARS now. Alliance politics driving people out of the game is old news.

His question was asking what the mods/developers are doing to promote growth OUTSIDE of the game.

It's not really a dying fad, it's just changed from being in-your-face to running in the background. Not to mention that Facebook is just the next logical step in a process that goes website -> Facebook -> Mobile devices.

the good thing about Facebook is that it links together our marketing model with the medium. being able to take advantage of that effectively will be good.

Just as a quick FB update -> everything is working nicely to create an account and play through facebook.... I'm just working on the recruiting system. You'll be able to invite people to your tag, your server, the game in general or send pact requests (non FFA) via Facebook.
We're focusing on making the experience for new players a better one, as right now it's a little daunting to get involved in the game. This was a major problem Earth had for years -- a steep learning curve.

Patience is a virtue....

I'm not very sure if I'm talking the her or it here though.

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the last one is saurons:P

Someones got his panties in a bunch, I also have not seen anything NBK has done to ESD in FFA... or is this talking about the past?

If present, I dont see NBK ruling the FFA server....

I know this always turns into a debate, but I think politics ruined the game more than cheating did. I will admit people did leave because of cheating and bots etc, BUT....

I, and a lot of people started leaving when the game became monotonous. Logging in to mass explore, because if you grab you'll be retalled 2x by said allaince with a 2:1 policy.
The time invested members always dominate the top 100 and the best fighters are the ones with more time than you.
You have to be allied to every alliance (unless you're the biggest) because if not the big guys farm you....etc etc.

Im not in the loop about how you're working gameplay into a facebook app, but I assume it's a seperate server altogether?
Something where people can log in once a day and still have a chance?

from my point of view

-politics- limited effect, pees people off
casual players generally do not like gangbangs nor unending wars and jihad against tags

-multies etc- yes, some people left as a result, not a big reason

-age- simply demographics, people running in the game that get burnt out, and just don't re-pick it up again

-RL- (see above) RL stuff comes along (busy, moving, work,, marriages, divorces), don't pick it up again because of the time it takes to run a country (let alone 16, lol)

-economy- a lot of people have lost their jobs, net access etc - difficult to get to play when you have no net access

-intensity of gameplay- face it, folks - we're an intense bunch of people here, some (seemingly) online 24/7

-cliques- (see above) we've been around one another for years (more than you average celeb marriage ;P ) - perhaps more than a little daunting for someone new to break into the habit when they're not on a level playing field

===
for when it comes to facebook, would strongly recommend some kind of spicy coding of the various servers, so that potential players can see the intensity of the game they're getting themselves into

[ 1 ] mild, good for beginners, easy-going (10min/day)
[ 2 ] average, good for advanced beginners (20min/day)
[ 3 ] intense, better suited to advanced players / masochists (30min/day)

think of how a curry / chilli would be coded in a supermarket for spicyness

How much will money matter for facebook? I really wonder how many players we'll be able to get for each dollar spent. I mean if we get one player per dollar invested in the long run, that might actually be pretty decent given that we probably have at least a dozen vets willing to donate 100$. Or am I kidding myself?

I cannot believe I am about to say this . . .

has anybody talked to mehul about getting access to email lists? Certainly 95% of the emails used to create accounts between 1996-2006 are no longer viable but there are probably a lot of people in that other 5% that would a least visit if they knew it was back and better than ever.

The biggest resource Earth had was the core group of people that poured tons of time and energy OUTSIDE of the game into making the game better. In a way, Earth was on the cutting edge of 'user generated content' and 'social networking'. If it had not been for EZClan, gamerstown, LKS, EStats, EGraphs, all of the web tutorials, clever, etc. the game would have vanished quietly along with all of the Y2K mania.

Its that very same factor that led to the creation of EE. Players with essentially nothing to gain got together and rebuilt the game from scratch. Thanks guys.

Facebook is a logical extension of the evolutionary trajectory that the game has taken. Right now whats most important is:

-doing it right, there is WAY to much competition to afford a second chance if its f'ed up out of the gate
-facilitating the social factors that elevated the game in the first place
-getting in front of as many sets of eyes as possible, thats why I mentioned old user emails - if we get enough old users linked to it - it will generate some inertia
-making the game engaging for a new audiance, which also means understanding the target market - nerdy stat-hounds built the community - so lets go out to the forums and find them. Just because we are not HALO does not mean that people who play HALO won't play EE
-Let go of the past

*THUD*
/me hops off of soap box

Yea, as pang and others have said here, we're taking some time mainly because we want it to be done right. If we wanted to simply have a front end that was just an iframe with the game in it in FB, then we probably could have launched that a month or two ago... but half the point of launching on FB is getting everything tied in to drive recruiting.


With regards to the alliance politics Charcoal: I tend to agree to a certain extent (the cheating *REALLY* was a problem in my mind, simply because it drove away some good groups of players and demoralized others, who otherwise could have recruited &etc...) but I think one of the main reasons these politics arose in the first place was due to the game switching from an Increasing player base (always increasing land, no problem) to a decreasing player base (increasing competition for the same land, even as the average player got "better"). It was probably inevitable. If we can, however, switch back to an increasing player base where n00bs outnumber vets, then we should logically see relaxed politics I think. Obviously we wouldn't be able to sustain growth indefinitely, but even if we equilibriate at a higher base that would help I think.





Oh and as for "getting home after 8 hours of work, and then wanting to work on earth"... heh... this is sometimes how I feel, it is hard for sure; plus I have to finish a thesis too, so I have full-time work (with 45 min commute either end) + thesis + Earth; and that really means there's high competition for my time =(

Soon the thesis bit will be done I hope though.

As a further addendum; we've actually had a fairly constant or even increasing number of players, but we have found that people are basically diversifying across servers; there are actually quite a number of players that don't play Alliance.

Random thought. Would it be possible to provide some sort of incentive for players to play in more than one server? Some sort of bonus that they get for playing multiple servers.

i think once the earth app hits facebook we will be flooded with new players, whether or not they stay is another. just look how many people play the zynga games like mafia wars. thats more or less the same idea (time/turn based play, clans/mafia etc.) as earth but requires no skill or strategy to be good at it.

Mafia Wars had 'some' graphics, and it was way too simple of a game.

no strategy at all, and that's why a lot of people play it..

there is one problem which this community should have no problem fixing

the site does not SEO well
for war games
for economic scenario games
for nation building games
on google, bing or cuil

that should be an easy problem for a group of econophilic nerds

I thought our SEO stuff was going pretty well actually :) main thing is we need things to start to link in heh

ok i am pleased to hear that

i was probably off on my search terms

next
since we have community members who are on line
24/7 we should have no problem with twitter monitoring
or other social media sites where gamers are looking for new games to play
we hop into their chats and tell them about the fantastic game EE
if we have a scripted email or tweet to shoot them we may grow by several players a day

Pang you totally took my post wrong... That's not what I was saying.

ya, I made a post asking for some help creating an "Game Info" page that I was expecting to make keyword rich, but no one really took it all that seriously, if I remember correctly, so nothing got done. The staff hasn't had time to write the content for one, so we're really only optimized for keywords about browser games and Earth Empires keywords. And even then, to be able to challenge for the kinds of search terms we want to target, we need to get our links up a bit, as qz noted. We're positioned well based on the type of game/community we currently have, but we aren't optimized for the marketing phase yet. Getting the content worked up is the next step in this area :)

We've not trying to work on each piece simultaneously, it's about making things sequentially so that each piece works together. The links will come from reviews and listings on game sites and we'll want reviews and reception to be positive, so we better make sure the site is finished first :p

But in the short term SEO front, we are LOW ON CONTENT!
We need content for the wiki and content for the public site. If you think you are able to help with us, please, let us know. We've put out several calls for help with copywriting and it seems to always end up with me and Slagpit sitting in the chat at like 1 AM talking about content :p

Yes, instead of you people writing long ass posts about how the game is dying, avert that energy into writing content for the Game Info page =P

it's not just for the game info page either! there's lots more needed!

we just need more content in general!
We need wiki pages built, we should start getting players to write blog posts about ingame stuff (politics, etc) and they can be published in a special area of the blog....

that's the best area where dedicated players can make a difference! Especially SEO focused folks... write some keyword rich info blurbs about the game, the concepts, alliances, whatever! :p

You need to hand pick those for each server. And with enough monitoring so they don't go apefluff and start posting things that shouldn't be posted

you can't just "SEO" a site without content.. like pang said.

What sort of stuff you lookin for in Game Info page?

i should really contribute something there....lol

I'm happy to write a blog post about some game aspect if you want, maybe a strategy based one?

OK, let's go!

those were what we had before, but we're looking for a page which is keyword rich and explains the game to draw the user in to want to play and learn more

As far as I've checked it out, the number of users of Earth Empires is roughly constant. The number of players on the alliance server is declining. For the most part, alliance leaders simply don't care to grow their alliances or even make the server fun to play.

1 word.
iphone application
ok...2 words.

but thats like, 10 mill potential new players.

"alliance leaders simply don't care to grow their alliances"
certainly not a trait of our man axa ;p
we're also trying to make the game more fun by running with fewer pacts so that it isnt an all-explore snorefest